Back of a woman's neck, with her hair in a bun, showing a black script tattoo reading Stay Gold in a lettering style.

Stay Gold script on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's neck and upper shoulders, with her hair tied up in a bun and her face not visible. The tattoo is the words Stay Gold written in a flowing black script, running down the side of the neck. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, against a plain pale wall.

Lettering Neck Script Word Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the bucket, because I'm not telling this twice and the kettle's only just gone on. Every boat in Porthgwidden knew the Sally Ann's skipper by his voice before they saw his lamp, and what he shouted at the mouth of the harbour every dawn was always the same two words, thrown over the engine like he was passing on a bet. Stay gold.

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Nobody asked him what he meant. The young lads took it for a joke about the sun catching the brass on the wheelhouse. Old Tobias Penhale knew better. He'd lost a brother to a February gale off the Lizard, and he'd come home with a gold ring on a bit of string and nothing to say about it. Every morning after that he ran the boat past the breakwater and waited for that minute when the light went flat across the bay and turned the whole water the colour of a new coin. Then he said it, to whoever was on deck.

In the autumn the herring went north, the Sally Ann came in with an empty hold and no skipper. The lads searched the rocks until the tide made them stop. Nobody had seen him go over. What they found, folded under the thwart in his oilskin pocket, was a single line in his careful hand: Tell the boys it was never the weather, only the light.

So the crew still shout it at the breakwater, every morning, and I'll tell you what I tell the new ones when they laugh at them. It isn't a wish for luck. It's what you say when the water goes gold and you're still there to see it, which is the only time anyone ever really means it.